I'm in a bit of a pickle here. I have an Atom 330-based tiny computer which I use as my HTPC. It performed its job fine running Windows 7 and Boxee, and over the past few months, it ran Mac OS X Leopard with Plex. Now, however, I want to try Linux as an HTPC operating system, but I kind of ran into a roadblock there with Ubuntu 9.10 - so the question is: what is a good HTPC Linux distribution?

A release is a release. There is no testing warning or whatever on Ubuntu's site. Why are you defending such an epic fail on Ubuntu's end? I mean come on - Intel video chips causing freezes all over the place?

That's unacceptable.

I'm not defending Ubuntu in any way. Ubuntu is based on Debian testing.
Look, if you use Fedora, you know it's a bleeding edge distro and it's a testing ground for new things.
It's your choice to use it, nobody put a gun over your head. There are bugs, yes and we all know it.
Now if you don't like unstable software, use Red Hat and pay for support, or use CentOS, or Debian stable.
There are literally more than 500 distros to choose from. YOU make the choice, according to what YOU want. Now if you want stability, DON'T USE BLEEDING EDGE DISTROS!!! Slackware, Red Hat, Debian (stable), etc... are made just for you! use that and stop whining.
If you still use bleeding edge distro, don't go around saying stupid things like 'linux is buggy', 'Windows is stable', etc... you just chose to use testing software.

If you still use bleeding edge distro, don't go around saying stupid things like 'linux is buggy', 'Windows is stable', etc... you just chose to use testing software.

I did not say such a thing. All I said was that if the most popular Linux distribution has major problems for the second release in a row with Intel video chips, then that's an EPIC FAIL. Bleeding edge blah blah or no, that's just totally unacceptable.

I did not say such a thing. All I said was that if the most popular Linux distribution has major problems for the second release in a row with Intel video chips, then that's an EPIC FAIL. Bleeding edge blah blah or no, that's just totally unacceptable.

Well, I was not replying to you in the first place, so you should put that in context.
Now, what is acceptable to you is up to you to decide. Obviously a lot of people like Ubuntu and are happy to hack under the hood to fix problems like that and to open bugs in launchpad.
If that is not acceptable to you, please either Use Debian stable, or at the very least Ubuntu LTS, but I'm sure you lie and are excited about the new features so you still accept that like most Ubuntu users.

Let's stop whining and think. Maybe Mark's idea of trying to synchronize things better in the FOSS world makes sense. What if projects synchronized a little. What if Xorg wasn't in complete disarray for one distro release... and then KDE wasn't in complete disarray for the next... and then we weren't in a cataclysmic transition from udev to devfs2 for the next. What if every 2 years we all came together for something that didn't resemble a Halloween party in a brown paper bag factory?

We are all in this together. All the projects. And yet each project acts as if its own schedule existed totally independent of the whole.

Don't use Ubuntu then. Or you use it just because it's popular and everyone else is doing it? You're putting yourself in the "I'm just a stupid user" position. You run OSNews, a news site for Operating Systems and stuff. How can you be so narrow-minded?

Honestly you are both correct to a degree. Ubuntu is based on Debian as we all know, but every non-LTS release is indeed on the so-called "bleeding edge".

While there are a lot of people trying really hard to make sure each release is stable enough for everyday use, inevitable bugs and broken functionality exist in nearly every one. This is due, in large part, to the strict six month release cycle which is tied to the Gnome desktop's development cycle. I've often wondered why they don't stretch it out and ship more stable software.

Because of this, you have a full release (as Thom correctly said) which is never quite ready for prime time (as spiderman opined). I'm on the horns of this dilemma myself, as the 9.10 release was supposed to have Grub 2 but instead seems to have shipped with Grub 1.9 beta, which refuses to do more than dump me to a grub command prompt. That is unacceptable and makes me want to stick with my old stalwart, Slackware.

I love what I saw of the Live CD, though to be honest it was a bit buggy too in other areas, but overall I'm unimpressed. Karmic was touted as the best Ubuntu yet by a large margin, but that's a silly claim when a large chunk of your audience (gma950 users) are shut out completely.

So Thom, I'll suggest--albeit in a less coarse manner than others--that you stick with a proven stable OS that fully supports Boxee, XBMC or MythTV, and leave Ubuntu behind for now. There are a few good Debian based ones out there (Dreamlinux springs to mind) so I know you'll eventually find what you need.

I'm not defending Ubuntu in any way. Ubuntu is based on Debian testing.

No, it's based on Debian Sid (debian unstable). They rebase their packages on Debian Sid every 6 months, and then spend a couple weeks re-integrating everything, then spend a couple week testing, and then release it. It's not that great of a release process, IMO.